1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an electronic device, a playback device and a server device, especially concerning an electronic device recording movies on recording media, a playback device playing movies, and a server device transferring the recorded movies.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, because of larger capacity of recording media, many users record images for long hours and watch long hours of images. In addition, because of improvement of recording technologies and communications technologies, many users record plural images and select an image to watch from the plural images. In other words, users have to search a desired position from the long hours of the image when watching the image, or have to search a desired image from the plural images and then search a desired position from the searched image. Chapter information is one of the information used for such a search.
When dividing chapters, an automatic division or a manual division can be applied as a dividing method.
In the automatic division, images are extracted periodically and a matching score is calculated between each extracted image and the previous or next image. If the matching score is low or almost mismatched, a scene is determined to be changed and a new chapter is allocated. However, when dividing chapters automatically, chapters cannot always be divided appropriately because the division of the chapters is determined only by elapsed time of a program or thumbnails of the extracted images.
On the other hand, in the manual division, chapters can be divided appropriately but users have to specify positions to divide the chapters. In other words, users have to watch the program once in order to find where to divide chapters.
Following technologies are known as related arts of the present invention.
Patent document 1: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2009-081575
Patent document 2: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-263502
Patent document 3: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-182674
Patent document 4: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-060305
Patent document 5: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-245259
Patent document 6: Patent Cooperation Treaty application Publication No. 2007/126097
Patent document 7: Patent Cooperation Treaty application Publication No. 2007/126096
Patent document 8: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-278088
Patent document 9: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-264789
Technologies for searching a desired scene from an image are disclosed in patent documents 1, 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
According to the technology disclosed in patent document 1, by adding metadata associated with plural information to movie frame numbers, thumbnails of the associated scene are dynamically generated based on a searching of a user, and the user can select the desired scene by referring to the thumbnails.
According to the technology disclosed in patent document 2, a system to share the scene of a program introduced in message boards or the like between an introducer and readers can be provided.
According to the technology disclosed in patent documents 6 and 7, a characteristic parameter to show the characteristic of video/audio data and an accompaniment parameter to link to the video/audio data are acquired together with the video data, then a display space is generated with the characteristic parameter and the accompaniment parameter are taken as coordinate axes, and then each video data is displayed on the display space based on the parameters.
According to the technology for specifying a scene to extract disclosed in patent document 8, plural comment information related to each content are divided into plural words by using a morphological analysis, then an evaluation value of each word is calculated based on an accumulated appearance frequency of each word, and then the beginning time and the end time of the scene are extracted based on a distribution shape of the evaluation value concerning the word in the content.
According to the technology for properly displaying comments added on a movie content disclosed in patent document 9, evaluations or comments of each scene of the movie content added by users are displayed on a time-line as a marker indicating a frequency of comments and tendency of the content.
In addition, patent documents 3-5 are disclosed to improve the watching environment in connection with the internet that has grown remarkably recent years.
According to the technology disclosed in patent document 3, by dynamically accessing a server on a network when watching temporally services such as broadcastings or DVDs, flexible expressions can be obtained and interactivity can be achieved.
According to the technology disclosed in patent document 4, by monitoring the numbers of messages written on message board servers corresponding to a broadcast station or a broadcasting program, evaluations of other people about the currently broadcasted program can be provided to viewers.
According to the technology disclosed in patent document 5, by making a personal space for each user with a security key in a server connecting via the internet and instructing from a mobile device to a television tuner connected to the server, television programs can be recorded in the personal space for each user by using data compression technologies.
As explained above, the environment to divide chapters of recorded images are not enough for end users, and a technology to divide chapters effectively is desired.
The present invention provides an electric device, a playback device and server device which can allocate chapters effectively.